244 PAINTING MATERIALS
was hammered flat and was dried in the sun. The method is peculiar to papyrus.
Paper, as usually defined, is made from the separated fibres reduced to a pulp
and felted into sheets in which the direction and arrangement of the fibres have
no relation to what they were in the plant. In its natural condition plant fibre is
associated with intercellular matters of a glutinous, resinous, or siliceous character
and the removal of these is the first step in producing a workable pulp.
The pulp for Chinese paper came largely from the inner bark of the bamboo
and the paper mulberry tree. Hemp was used, cotton and linen rags were some-
times added, and occasionally refuse silk may have been put in, though alone it
would not have been suitable. There is a coarse Chinese paper made of straw
but this is used as a wrapping.
Soon after paper-making had come into Europe, it was found that a fine pulp
could be made with relative ease frojm. old rags of cotton and linen, for the cloth
had already gone through a process that had cleared the fibres of most extraneous
materials. Rag papers are still the finest support of the paper kind to be had for
paintings and similar works of art. In modern manufacture, the rags that come to
the mill are dusted, sorted, cut into small pieces, and boiled in an alkaline solution
under low steam pressure during six to twelve hours. They are then washed and
are * broken * in a machine that contains a roll and a steel plate so arranged that
they tease out the fibres, destroying the textile nature of the material and reducing
it to a pulp. The pulp is then given a chlorine bleach. After that comes beating
which makes it absorbent and felted in its structure. When paper is made by hand,
it is formed from the wet pulp on a wire screen that is the size of the sheet and has
a removable frame, the deckel. The pulp is shaken out on the screen, and when
the sheet is formed, it is laid out on a felt. A number of them are piled and pressed
and then are dried. Such a method is little different from that described by Hans
Sachs, cobbler-poet of Niirnberg, in a German book of trades, 1568 (translation
from Hunter, Paper-Making, etc., p. 22):
Rags are brought into my mill
Where much water turns the wheel,
They are cut and torn and shredded,
To the pulp is water added;
Then the sheets twixt felts must lie
While I wring them in my press.
Lastly, hang them up to dry
Snow-white in glossy loveliness.
When practically dry, the paper is separated from the felts and taken to lofts
where the individual sheets are spread out. Paper at this stage is called * water
leaf * or * rough * and is highly absorbent, but is used directly by some for water
color painting. To overcome the absorbency, the paper is put through a sizing
bath, and is again dried and pressed (rolled) to give the desired finish; cold pressed
(C.P.) is paper of medium absorbency, and hot pressed (H.P.) is denser and has